'Tis the season and we are slowly transforming the house into a winter wonderland (ha, not really). Jay did so good getting the living room all ready on Friday so we could go get a real, live Christmas tree on Saturday afternoon. He moved the furniture and bought a real tree stand. Saturday after the biscuits and gravy breakfast, I crashed. Lane had already crashed that morning with a fever. And we didn't get back up again. We'll go tomorrow, he said. Sunday morning brought about a new phase of Lane's ickiness, the pukes...so we still don't have that tree just yet.
This may seem pitiful to say, but our kids have never had a real, live Christmas tree. I have this artificial, pre-lit tree that is perfect for our small living room. Of course, the last two years the pre-lit lights were burnt out, so it was real classy to string working lights over the non-working ones. Oh, yeah. I still like the shape, it's one of those that tall and thin...doesn't stick way out.
But anyway, I'm realizing that things don't have to be perfect and match and just how I want them...so we're going for the real thing this year. Last year I let them have colored lights even...eeeew. Not a fan of those either, but I'll take one for the team and go with the flow.
This got me thinking about the last time we had a real tree. It was our first Christmas in our new house, December of 2001. Madolyn was just over a year old. It was a Sunday afternoon. We went, picked one out at the local pine patch and discovered, as is customarily the problem, it looked so much smaller out in the wild. You know how it goes, you find the perfect tree, get it home and then there's a Clark Griswald Christmas tree scene unfolding before your very eyes. The tree won't fit. What were we thinking?
So we get the tree in the house, realize it will not fit in the living room...at least if you want to see the television, which is a high priority, and decide it will have to sit right in between the living room and kitchen. (Our kitchen/dining and living room is all one open area.) It's not ideal, but it would work. I work and work getting it decorated. Jay wasn't any help and Madolyn sure wasn't old enough to help. The lights had given me fits to begin with and nothing was going how I wanted it, but finally I got everything just so (or at least okay) and we left for an evening church program.
I had been at my wit's end with the tree before we left for church. I just wanted to be done with it, to be able to put all the boxes and stuff away and get the mess cleaned up. We walked in the house after church and the tree was over on its side. Water was all over the floor. Ornaments off the tree. Lights sagging every which way. Meep, the dirty rat, was nowhere to be found...although, to be honest, I don't even know that he was the culprit. I had had a time getting the tree to stand straight so it might have fallen on its own.
In full Christmas spirit, I removed all the ornaments and lights and shoved the tree out the back patio doors. We didn't have a deck built at the time, so it literally went out the door and fell three feet or more to the ground where it remained until...
Later that week I was talking with my court reporter friend "Traci" about Christmas trees. She mentioned wanting to find a real one. I told her I had a great one that she could have, she just had to come get it. She has two boys, at the time they were youngsters, and they came with her husband to snatch up the perfectly good Christmas tree lying in our yard. For many years, whenever "Traci" referred to me by name, the boys would say something like, "oh, you mean that lady who threw the Christmas tree out." Yep, that's the Christmas spirit.
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